Word: tierney
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...Norton, which will publish Tierney's book in mid-November, sent galleys to Turner and Sponsel, and when their memorandum began zipping around the Internet, a vituperative debate exploded. Last week the story broke in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Turner and Sponsel not only found Tierney's research credible but warned that "the impending scandal...in its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption is unparalleled in the history of anthropology." In a controversial extrapolation, they suggested a motive for spreading the measles epidemic: if deliberately ignited, it may have been to prove Neel's "fascistic eugenics" theories--that...
...widely circulated e-mail, he charged that an American Anthropological Association open forum next month would be "a feeding frenzy in which I am the bait." In a statement posted on a website of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he remains professor emeritus, he accuses Tierney, Turner and Sponsel of engaging in a "long vendetta against me." The allegations, he told TIME, are "grotesque... Nobody died of measles in the villages we vaccinated." As for the staged fights and phony film sets, Chagnon said the charges are "totally incorrect...
...Files theory of history, we could propose that he planted these records, including the much scribbled on and often almost illegible field notes, in order to mislead future historians." But, she notes, papers from Venezuelan authorities and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control specifically refute some of Tierney's charges, including his assertion that Neel did not have official permission to vaccinate. Irving Devore, former chairman of the anthropology department at Harvard, also rallied to Chagnon's side, calling Tierney's book "a scurrilous tissue of lies...
...addition to Chagnon and Neel, another scientific heavyweight--French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who lived among the Yanomami for 25 years--is targeted by Tierney. He describes Lizot as keeping a virtual harem of Yanomami boys and exchanging gifts for sexual favors...
...controversy is not likely to abate soon, perhaps not until the scientific community officially investigates the issues raised in Tierney's book. Barbara Johnston, human-rights chair of the American Anthropological Association, finds Tierney's "90 interviews, Freedom of Information Act documents, audiotapes from film outtakes" significant. But she reaches no conclusion. "There is extensive documentation but a lot of room for argument," she says. "If even 10% of these allegations are valid, we must take a good look...